Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different colors, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects, for example, as discussed in detail in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,016,038 and 6,211,626, incorporated herein by reference.
Users often desire to be notified of the occurrence of pressure waves such as sound and ultrasonic waves when the users are not proximate to such pressure waves. For example, baby monitors enable parents to monitor their children while the parents are out of earshot. When a baby starts crying, parents can take appropriate action, such as feeding the baby or changing its diaper. However, such technology requires that parents acquire and deploy baby monitor equipment that does not serve many other obvious purposes, and which may decrease in usefulness as the child ages.
The capability exists to configure mobile computing devices such as smart phones and tablet computers to stand in as baby monitor transmitters and receivers, e.g., using WiFi. One device may stream audio and/or send notification (e.g., as a text message) of an audio event to another device. However, such technology may be cumbersome to set up, and a user may wish to use her smart phone or tablet computer for other purposes. Moreover, using baby monitors, smart phones and tablet computers as described above fails to take advantage of connected lighting infrastructure exists or may soon exist in nearly all homes or other buildings.
Thus, there is a need in the art to take advantage of connected lighting infrastructure this is or soon will be found in nearly all homes and other buildings to enable users to remotely monitor pressure waves.